What the Marine Corps Planning Process and Peak OS Share About Organizational Execution

The Marine Corps Planning Process and Peak OS were created in very different environments and through very different paths. Yet when the two systems are placed next to one another, many of the underlying principles are remarkably similar.

The Marine Corps Planning Process, or MCPP, is designed to help commanders and teams understand complex situations, create shared intent, coordinate specialized groups, make decisions, execute, assess what is happening, and adapt as conditions change. The Marine Corps describes the resulting plans as hypotheses that are tested and refined through execution and assessment.

Peak OS emerged from a different source. I developed it over more than two decades of working with hundreds of founders, CEOs, investors, and leadership teams, looking for the recurring behaviors and operating habits that differentiated teams that consistently executed from those that struggled as complexity increased.

I did not develop Peak OS from Marine Corps doctrine. That is what makes the comparison interesting.

Organizations confronting very different kinds of complexity appear to have arrived independently at many of the same operating principles.

For leaders with military experience—and particularly those now building aerospace, defense, advanced-engineering, and other frontier-tech companies—the parallels may feel familiar.

Two Very Different Environments With a Similar Execution Challenge

A growth company is not a military organization, and business execution should not be confused with military operations. The consequences, authorities, structures, and environments are fundamentally different.

But underneath those differences is an organizational challenge that both systems have to solve.

A single leader cannot see everything, decide everything, coordinate everything, or personally execute everything.

Multiple specialized teams have to operate simultaneously. Those teams need enough autonomy to do their jobs well, yet their work must remain connected to a common mission. Information has to move across organizational boundaries. People need to understand what is happening outside their immediate function. Plans have to survive contact with changing conditions. Leaders have to recognize when something is off course early enough to respond.

That becomes particularly relevant in frontier technology.

An aerospace or defense company may need Engineering, Product, Program Management, Manufacturing, Quality, Finance, Business Development, Operations, and external partners to converge on the same outcomes. Each function can be highly capable. The organization can still fail if those capabilities are not coordinated.

This is an organizational execution problem.

It is also where many of the parallels between MCPP and Peak OS become visible.

MCPP Starts by Creating Shared Understanding

The six formal steps of MCPP are problem framing, course-of-action development, course-of-action wargaming, course-of-action comparison and decision, orders development, and transition. The Marine Corps describes the process as a way to promote understanding among the commander, planners, staff, and subordinate commanders about the nature of the problem and options for solving it.

Problem framing comes first for a reason.

The Marine Corps argues that no amount of subsequent planning can compensate for misunderstanding the problem. Planning therefore begins by developing an understanding of the current environment, the desired state, the problems standing between the two, and the purpose of the operation.

Peak OS begins with the same broad principle: clarity precedes execution.

Before a team can decide what to accomplish this quarter, it needs a shared understanding of why the organization exists, where it is going, what success looks like, and what the organization needs to accomplish along the way.

In Peak, the Mission establishes the North Star. The Three-Year Vision establishes a future destination. The One-Year Plan translates that vision into a nearer definition of success. OKRs then create focused outcomes for the next execution period.

The important idea is not the terminology.

It is that people cannot coordinate effectively around a future they understand differently.

In Peak Teams, alignment is defined around agreement on six fundamental questions: Why are we doing this? Where are we going? When will we get there? What must we do? How will we do it? And who do we need to succeed?

MCPP and Peak both make shared understanding foundational rather than assuming it exists.

Clear Intent Makes Distributed Decision-Making Possible

One of the strongest parallels is between the military concept of commander's intent and the relationship between clarity, alignment, and empowerment in Peak OS.

MCPP describes commander's intent as a clear expression of purpose and desired end state. Its importance goes beyond communicating a plan. Intent provides enough larger context that subordinate leaders can exercise judgment when circumstances change and the originally assigned task no longer fits the situation.

That is a powerful organizational principle.

The point of clarity is not to tell everyone exactly what to do.

The point is to give people enough context to make good decisions when a leader is not standing next to them.

Peak approaches the problem through Mission, Three-Year Vision, One-Year Plan, OKRs, KPIs, and clear Roles and Responsibilities. Together, those mechanisms help people understand the organization, the outcomes that matter, their contribution, and the boundaries of their ownership.

In Peak Teams, empowerment is directly connected to clarity. When roles and responsibilities are clear, people can make decisions and take action without continually seeking approval.

That produces a similar underlying progression:

Clarity → Alignment → Empowerment → Distributed Execution

This becomes increasingly important as an organization scales.

At 15 people, a founder may be able to stay involved in most consequential decisions. At 150, that same behavior can make the founder the primary constraint on execution.

The answer is not to remove the leader from the system. It is to create enough organizational clarity that good judgment can be distributed throughout it.

Both Systems Treat the Organization as a Team of Teams

MCPP explicitly emphasizes integrated planning.

That integration occurs hierarchically between levels of command and laterally among different units and specialized functions. The doctrine emphasizes involving the right people early so that more factors can be considered, omissions can be reduced, and information can be shared broadly.

Peak planning operates through a similarly interconnected model.

Planning does not simply begin with the leadership team creating a plan in isolation and then cascading instructions downward.

Before planning, leaders gather information and perspective from their teams. Boards and other "up teams" can also provide context and input. Functional leaders bring that understanding into leadership planning.

The leadership team develops the organizational Three-Year Vision, One-Year Plan, and company-level priorities together.

Then planning moves back through the organization.

Teams interpret the organizational plan, think through their contribution, develop supporting objectives, identify dependencies, and gather additional feedback. That information moves back upward and laterally, allowing the broader plan to be challenged and refined.

The Peak Teams planning process explicitly incorporates bottoms-up involvement. Functional leaders gather input from their teams before planning, and the leadership team then discusses objectives across functional boundaries so that areas such as Product, Engineering, Sales, Finance, and People do not create incompatible plans.

This is more than cascading goals.

It is integrated planning across a team of teams.

The Plan Gets Tested Before the Organization Fully Commits

MCPP does not assume that a plan is good because smart people created it.

Courses of action are wargamed to identify weaknesses, omissions, likely reactions, risks, and other forms of friction. The purpose of the exercise is to improve the plan and deepen understanding of both the problem and the environment.

Peak creates a comparable challenge-and-refinement loop through the organization.

After the initial leadership planning work, functional and subordinate teams take the plan back into their areas. They think through what it means operationally. They discuss priorities with the people closest to execution. They identify dependencies and constraints. They test whether their own objectives support the organizational objectives.

Their feedback then comes back into the broader planning process.

Peak's approach to functional objectives is deliberately iterative. Teams assess the company-level OKRs, develop and adjust their functional objectives, and bring them back for discussion so intersections and dependencies can be understood.

The plan therefore becomes stronger as more of the organization understands and challenges it.

That is an important distinction.

Planning is not complete simply because the leadership team has agreed. The people responsible for executing the plan need to be able to understand it, test it against their reality, and connect their work to it.

Planning and Execution Stay Connected Through Operating Rhythm

Another major parallel is that neither system treats planning as something that ends when a planning session is over.

MCPP describes planning, execution, and assessment as interacting activities with feedback loops. New information can influence previous assumptions and cause the organization to reconsider earlier decisions.

Peak OS uses operating rhythm to accomplish this in a growth company.

At the longer horizon, the Annual Session establishes or refreshes the Three-Year Vision and One-Year Plan and creates the first execution priorities.

At quarterly or semiannual intervals, the team reviews the One-Year Plan from its new vantage point, evaluates progress, incorporates what it has learned, and establishes the next set of OKRs.

Then comes the weekly feedback loop.

The Weekly Camp reviews OKRs and KPIs. The purpose is not prolonged status reporting. Owners identify whether something is On-Course, Off-Course, Done, or, where appropriate, being pushed. Off-course OKRs and KPIs move to Triage.

Triage is where the team responds.

Peak's ACT process asks the team to Assess the situation, Consider alternatives, and Take action. A decision becomes a concrete next step with ownership and timing.

That creates a recurring execution loop:

Plan → Execute → See → Discuss → Decide → Act

Then the organization does it again the following week.

The cadence allows the company to remain disciplined without becoming rigid.

Both Systems Expect Reality to Change

MCPP explicitly recognizes that plans operate inside changing environments.

Reframing may be required because the original problem changes, capabilities change, progress is inadequate, external conditions shift, or critical assumptions prove false.

Peak OS is similarly built around recurring review rather than annual certainty.

The One-Year Plan is not created and forgotten.

At subsequent Quarterly or Semiannual Sessions, the leadership team examines it again with additional information and experience. It can update the plan and then establish the next set of OKRs from that revised understanding.

Team Surveys provide another form of organizational feedback. They allow teams to examine not only whether the company is achieving the plan but also how effectively the team itself is operating. In Peak Teams, the learning system is explicitly built around repetition, review, reflection, Team Surveys, and operating cadence.

This creates an important balance.

High-performing organizations need enough discipline to stay aligned to a plan and enough learning capacity to recognize when reality has invalidated part of it.

Adaptability is not constantly changing direction.

It is having a reliable mechanism for recognizing when a response is required and at what level.

The Slingshot Aerospace Experience Makes the Parallel Tangible

One of the most relevant examples in Peak Teams comes from Melanie Stricklan's experience as CEO and co-founder of Slingshot Aerospace.

Stricklan described how her experience as a combat-tested U.S. Air Force veteran had ingrained a discipline of defining the end goal and driving the mission toward it while making decisions amid chaos. Yet when building Slingshot, the leadership team discovered that those principles had not automatically translated into organizational alignment.

The Peak process surfaced differences in how the team understood the company's mission, vision, and direction. Creating greater clarity ultimately influenced significant decisions about the business, its people, and its product strategy. Stricklan described the organization becoming more oriented around a team-of-teams, mission-driven perspective.

That example helps explain why Peak can feel intuitive to leaders coming from military environments.

The terminology may be different.

The underlying beliefs often are not.

Why These Parallels Matter for Frontier-Tech Companies

Frontier-tech organizations frequently combine several characteristics that make organizational execution unusually difficult.

They are solving problems that do not have established playbooks. Technical and commercial uncertainty exist simultaneously. Specialized functions have strong expertise and their own languages. Hardware, software, manufacturing, operations, customers, regulators, capital providers, and external partners can all create dependencies. Timelines may be long while the pressure for progress is intense.

Adding more talented people does not automatically solve that coordination problem.

In some cases it makes the problem harder because more expertise creates more interfaces that have to be synchronized.

What these organizations need is not greater centralized control.

They need shared intent, organizational clarity, integrated planning, visible outcomes, defined ownership, disciplined communication, recurring assessment, and distributed decision-making.

Those principles appear repeatedly in the Marine Corps Planning Process.

They also appear throughout Peak OS.

Similar Operating Principles Can Emerge From Similar Problems

The most interesting part of this comparison is not that business leaders should copy the military.

They should not.

The interesting observation is that when organizations have to execute through complexity, uncertainty, specialization, and interdependence, certain operating principles appear repeatedly.

Create shared understanding before acting.

Make the mission and intent clear.

Integrate planning across the organization.

Give teams enough context and ownership to execute.

Create visibility into what is actually happening.

Build recurring forums for assessment and decisions.

Learn from execution.

Adapt without losing alignment.

I arrived at Peak OS by observing hundreds of companies over more than two decades and continually asking what the most successful teams were doing differently. The five behaviors that ultimately became SCALE—Symbiosis, Communication, Alignment, Learning, and Empowerment—came out of that accumulated experience.

The Marine Corps arrived at its doctrine through a profoundly different body of experience.

Yet many of the operating threads converge.

For military and former-military leaders entering the frontier-tech world, that may help explain why Peak OS can feel less like an unfamiliar business methodology and more like a recognizable way of thinking about execution—translated for the realities of building and scaling a company.

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